The Ethnos of the Earth: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and International Order

For something that purports to be a natural and self-evident phenomenon, the concept of ethnicity is surprisingly new: the word ‘ethnicity’ first appears in 1920 and it did not acquire widespread currency until the second half of the century. Why was this new concept invented in the twentieth century? Why were pre-existing concepts deemed inadequate? What kinds of phenomena does the concept of ethnicity make visible and what does it conceal? To answer these questions, the three chapters that compose this PhD thesis reconstruct the conceptual history of ‘ethnicity’ in relation to its key neighbours and predecessors: Chapter 1 focuses on ‘nation’, Chapter 2 on ‘race’, and Chapter 3 on ‘tribe’. Focusing on the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the first chapter traces the emergence of ethnicity as a depoliticised alternative to nationality that allowed political actors to address the problem of culture difference without raising the question of national self-determination and the spectre of secession. Next, the second chapter shows how the concept of ethnicity worked in tandem with the concept of racism to displace the concept of race from the international plane around the middle of the twentieth century. Whereas the nineteenth-century concept of race was intrinsically intertwined with the hierarchical structuring of the imperial world order, the concept of ethnicity entirely lacks this international dimension: there is no ‘global ethnic line’ as there was a ‘global colour line’. Finally, the third chapter explores the relationship between the concept of ethnicity and the concept of tribe, demonstrating how the replacement of the latter by the former in the 1960s contributed to the dismantling of the old ‘standard of civilisation’. Whereas the contrast between primitive tribes and civilised nations had helped to prop up a bifurcated imperial system, the concept of ethnicity is characterised by a cultural relativism that seems to concede the equality of all peoples. Taken together, the three chapters demonstrate that the invention of ethnicity was symptomatic of a fundamental transformation in the global sociopolitical imaginary: the imperial world order of the long nineteenth century gave way to an ‘anarchical’ system of formally equal sovereign states. What the concept of ethnicity makes visible is a depoliticised, domesticated, and relativised form of culture difference that is compatible with the ideological structure of the modern international order. What the concept of ethnicity conceals is the persistence of neocolonial and racialised forms of domination that continue to structure international relations